" In order to go unnoticed, the arsonist would have needed to know the building well, and be able to use their time well. This is why it is likely that the Nazis, a group who knew the Reichstag well, directed the Fire; Goring, in Source E, supposedly said "The only one who really knows about the Reichstag building is I- .
This suggests to me that the Nazis could easily have plotted the incident because they would have known the best places to go undercover in the Reichstag, and light the fire. .
When the Reichstag did burn down in February 1933, Hitler immediately accused the Communists of having set the fire. From the account of Rudolf Diels, head of the Prussian Political Police, the suspected van der Lubbe was "naked from the waist upwards, smeared with dirt and sweating," which is evidence that he was at the scene, and had obviously "completed a tremendous task." Van der Lubbe was then arrested and charged. Diels says that it would have been easy for van der Lubbe to light the Reichstag on Fire, by setting alight the "old furniture, the heavy curtains, and the bone dry, wooden panels." I think that van der Lubbe had been used by the Nazis, because it would have been nearly impossible for a "man without knowledge of the place, and seriously handicapped, both mentally and physically," to have set the building on fire with no other help. When van der Lubbe was interrogated, he claimed to set fire to the Reichstag all by himself, and that "the other defendants (including the Communists were not in the Reichstag." I cannot see any hard evidence that van der Lubbe could have managed to act solely, but I know that the Reichstag Fire would have been very convenient for the Nazis.
I think that the Nazis used Van der Lubbe as a scapegoat. They could have bribed him easily because he came to the country, he had little money. He was also seriously handicapped, so could have been tricked into it, or might not have even have known what was going to happen.
